


First, Last

by ellispark



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Implied Sexual Content, Oh Jess, we barely knew ye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 11:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11485758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellispark/pseuds/ellispark
Summary: “Hey, like, not to be rude, but I can’t see around your hair.”Those are the first words Jessica Moore, art history senior, says to Sam Winchester, pre-law junior.





	First, Last

**571 days**

“Hey, like, not to be rude, but I can’t see around your hair.”

Those are the first words Jessica Moore, art history senior, says to Sam Winchester, pre-law junior. She’s teasing, really, trying to be clever, to make him finally notice her, because there are only three weeks left in this semester and then she’ll never see him again, this quiet boy who keeps sitting in front of her in her Latin class.

Jess took Latin because she heard this professor was easy. Sam Winchester apparently already speaks it, as much as anyone can speak a dead language, and she’s maybe been a little bit in love with him since the first time she heard him say “nosce te ipsum” with perfect pronunciation.

She smiles when he turns around, red-faced and clearly flustered, muttering, “sorry” to the floor. Jess starts to panic a little when he moves to get up, because she definitely misjudged the right approach, here. Clearly the guy, although maybe the most handsome man at Stanford, doesn’t often get jokingly flirted with.

“Hey,” she says again, and reaches out to rest a hand on his arm, stopping him from getting up. “Bad joke.” She smiles again, and finally Sam Winchester looks her in the eye, and yes, if Jess didn’t know before this moment how badly she wanted to talk to him, to have him look at her, those hazel eyes and that timid upturn of his lips would seal the deal.

“I’m Jess,” she says, moving her hand from his arm and holding it out in front of him. He shakes it with a surprisingly firm grip.

“I know,” he says, somewhat shyly. “You always argue with Dr. Klein.”

She shrugs, trying to hide how ridiculously happy she is that this cute boy noticed her. She’s not a freshman, after all.

“He’s sexist,” Jess says. “He never calls on the girls, and he always treats our input with less value.”

Sam huffs a laugh.

“Yeah, guy’s a jerk,” he says, then scoots his chair over slightly to the right, presumably so she can see the board better. “I’m Sam, by the way.”

Jess nods, still grinning like an idiot and feeling suddenly, inexplicably brave.

“Oh, I know. You’re the guy who always gets all the answers right, and also the guy I’d like to get coffee with some time.”

It’s cute, the way a blush springs up over his cheekbones instantly, the way he nods eagerly before saying, “Yeah, yeah, I’d like that.”

Jess rummages in her purse for a Sharpie, then writes her number carefully on the back of his hand. When Dr. Klein comes in and calls for class to start, she’s still smiling to herself.

**391 days**

Sometimes Sam scares her a little.

Now, Jess isn’t afraid _of_ Sam. No, she’s mostly afraid _for_ him. In the six months since they’ve started dating, he’s woken up screaming in the middle of the night at least two dozen times, thrashing wildly in bed, sweaty and manic. The most recent nightmare happened the night before. He kept muttering in Latin, words she couldn't quite discern. She hates when he does that, doesn’t know what it means. All she can do is try to wake him up, hold him close until he falls asleep again.

He never tells her what he dreams about.

Jess knows his mom died when he was a baby, in a fire. She thinks maybe he dreams of flames. Jess knows he hasn’t spoken to his father in years. She thinks maybe he dreams of the last big fight they had, right before he came to Stanford. Jess knows his brother is a womanizer and a wild card and that Sam misses him, even if he never says it out loud. She thinks maybe he dreams of Dean, trapped somewhere Sam can’t reach.

But she doesn’t know for sure.

He’s not jealous or overprotective, but he hates it when she walks alone across campus at night. Sam doesn’t say anything about it, doesn’t tell her not to spend her late night hours in the grad student carrels at the library, but he does seem relieved every time she calls him to walk her home after the sun goes down.

He never drinks more than a beer or two, which is obviously not an issue — Jess has dated an alcoholic before, briefly, and it wasn’t fun — but the one time Sam did get drunk he started gushing weepy gibberish about his family, how they’re cursed. Jess took him to his apartment early, and they never spoke about it after Sam sobered up.

He starts wildly at loud noises, hates people coming up from behind him. He has the oddest scars he claims he doesn’t remember receiving — a huge gash down the right side of his abdomen, two puffy puncture wounds on his neck, a bad burn on his left ankle, and, most disturbingly, what looks like bite marks just above his right elbow.

Jess learns early enough that she hates his family, wherever they are, for hurting Sam, for abandoning him, for never calling. She hopes he’ll tell her the truth one day, but she doesn’t want to push. She’s just afraid that if he keeps it all in forever, someday he’ll break.

**182 days**

“I like it,” Jess says, twirling around the living room. “Look, I can set up my easel right there, and the kitchen’s just big enough to move around in. Oh, and all your big law books will definitely fit once we buy some sturdier bookshelves and put them over...”

Before she can finish speaking, Sam sweeps her, quite literally, off her feet, swirling her around in a circle. Jess laughs and pushes at his back half-heartedly.

“Let me down!” she says. “No dancing until you’ve helped me unpack at least ten boxes.”

Sam lets her feet touch the floor, but he doesn’t loosen his grip, kissing her cheek sloppily.

“Five boxes,” he bargains, and she groans, knowing immediately that of course she’s going to give in.

Jess pulls back to look him in the eyes, placing her hands on his chest.

“Seven,” she says, and Sam smiles that big smile, the rare one he gets when he’s really happy, the one that makes his eyes crinkle at the edges, that makes him finally look younger, like he's actually his age and not some world-weary old man.

“Seven,” he agrees, letting her go to place his hands on his hips. She watches him survey the room, a satisfied look on his face. “This is probably the nicest place I’ve ever lived.”

Jess starts a little at that, the way she always does when his past hits her in the face without warning. She knows his dad does migrant work, that they moved around constantly, but she never gave much thought to what kinds of places little Sam grew up in. This isn’t even that great of an apartment, but he’s looking at the living room like he’s standing in the Taj Mahal.

She pictures a younger Sam, far younger than she’s ever seen him, playing on the floor of some roach-infested motel and suddenly she feels like crying. Jess never cries in front of Sam. She knows she could, knows he would hold her and whisper sweet things in her ear if she ever did, but she never wants to be another burden on him. The weight of the life he lived before her, the life he never talks about except in the barest of detail, is enough for him to carry.

So Jess hurries to the kitchen, starting to unpack her chipped dishes and Sam’s plastic cups, and Sam comes to the doorway to watch.

“Hey,” he says softly, and Jess looks at him, hoping he can’t see her eyes are wet. “I’m happy, Jess. I’m happy here with you.”

She tries to smile, says, “Yeah, I’m happy, too.”

**137 days**

Dean Winchester calls Sam’s phone one day, and Jess picks it up.

Sam’s at the library. He’s always at the library, now, studying relentlessly for the LSAT. Jess understands. Most of her time these days is spent working on her thesis, holed up in their apartment with hundreds of photocopies of various Impressionist works littered around her. It’s crunch time, but she always tells herself it will be worth it, when Sam’s a lawyer and she’s an art professor. When they buy a nice house in Palo Alto, get their dream dog and a new, more reliable car. When they’re married, a thought that always makes her smile.

The number on the phone is unlisted, which may be why Jess answers it, saying cheekily, “Sam’s phone, Jess speaking — and before you ask, no, we’re poor college students and we're not buying.”

A gruff voice says, “Who is this?”

Jess rolls her eyes and starts reorganizing her cluttered workspace, pressing the phone between her ear and the crook of her shoulder.

“Jessica Moore.”

“Where’s Sam?”

“Out,” she says curtly. “Now, who is this?”

There’s silence on the line for several seconds.

“Dean,” the guy says finally. “His brother, if he hasn’t told you anything about me.”

 _Oh, I know who you are,_ Jess wants to say. _I know you took your father’s side when he and Sam fought about school. I know his body’s covered in scars you didn’t stop him from getting. I know he cries out for you at night, but when he wakes up he doesn’t want to talk about you. I know he misses you, but I also think he hates you a little bit, maybe a lot._

Instead she says, “He hasn’t really said anything about you. Can I take a message?”

More silence. Then, “I just wanted to —” There’s a pause, and Dean sighs. “You know what? Never mind. Forget that I called.”

The phone beeps when he hangs up. If it belonged to her, Jess would throw it across the room in her anger.

How dare he call Sam after years of radio silence? How dare he drudge up the history that has Sam terrified half the time, constantly looking over his shoulder? How dare he try to be a part of the new life Sam is building, one where he’s happy and _safe_?

Maybe the worst sin in Jessica Moore’s life is that she never tells Sam his brother called, and she deletes the record from his phone.

**55 days**

They drive down the coast for a quick getaway, stopping at a bungalow their friend Terri’s family owns. It’s all theirs for three days.

Three days spent frolicking — yeah, that’s the best word for it — on the beach, making shitty hot dogs on the cheap grill, skinny dipping in the ocean at night (Jess is actually illogically terrified of sharks, so she always makes Sam swim out ahead of her — “You’re a bigger meal!” she says, teasing).

Making love on the beach turns out to be overrated — so much sand, in too many uncomfortable places — so they use the bed after the first night, and they probably spend more time there than they should. But every time one of them gets up, protesting about seeing the ocean, the other one pulls them right back in, and there they go again. If Jess ever worried about their sex life while they were in the midst of all their thesis writing and LSAT studying, she’s not worried anymore.

On their last night at the bungalow Sam builds a small bonfire out of driftwood and dried grass, sparking the flames with twigs, just like a Boy Scout (which, Jess is pretty sure he never was one, but he doesn’t tell her how he learned all this stuff).

“Show off,” she says, but it’s without any malice, and Sam pulls her down to sit next to him in the sand. She teaches him how to make smores the Moore family way, which really just means double layers of everything.

“Hey,” Sam says, once the fire starts to die and Jess is beginning to drift off. “I have sort of an important question to ask you.”

“Hmmm?” She leans against his broad chest, closing her eyes as he wraps his arms around her.

“Do you ever think about us getting engaged?”

Well, now she’s awake. Jess turns to look at him, heart thumping wildly at the sight of Sam’s openly earnest face. He looks _hopeful_. It’s not a look he wears often.

She swallows, says, “All the damn time.”

Sam laughs a little, bending down to rub her nose with his, this sweet butterfly kiss she taught him when they first started dating.

“Okay,” he says, grinning widely, and now she’s laughing, too, giddy. “Okay, when we get back we’ll look at rings, and I'll start saving money for one. Sound good?”

Jess just nods frantically, like he did when she first asked him to get coffee in Dr. Klein’s class, and pulls him down for a hard kiss.

**1 day**

She listens to the voicemail three times, telling herself _no, Sam doesn’t sound weird; yes, he’s fine. He promised he’d come back. He’s coming back._

Jess doesn’t like Dean any better in person than she did getting to know him through Sam’s vague stories. She doesn’t like that her Sam — studious, dedicated, hardworking Sam — is spending the weekend before his incredibly important law school interview chasing down his deadbeat father with his equally deadbeat brother.

He said he was fine, though, in the voicemail. She’ll have to accept that.

Jess decides that since she can’t focus on any work while he’s gone, she’s got to distract herself in some other way. So she goes shopping, picking out the ingredients for Sam’s favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe. She calls him on the way to the store.

“Hey, it’s me. It’s about 10:20... Uh, I got your message. Just checking in. Love you, be safe, come home soon, and all that crap. Okay, bye.”

He doesn’t call back, so she pours her frustration into the dough, beating in the chips savagely and debating calling again.

 _You’re not that girl,_ she reminds herself. _You’re not clingy and obsessive._

So she doesn’t call.

The doorbell rings when she’s on her fourth batch of cookies, worry-baking through all of the ingredients she bought today, even though she intended to stop herself much sooner.

Jess half runs to the door, expecting Sam. She opens it without looking through the peephole.

“Oh,” she says, any potential elation deflated upon seeing who it is. “Hey, Brady.”

Brady smiles.

“Well, don’t sound so disappointed, Jess.”

She tries her best to smile back.

“Sorry, long day.” Jess stands back from the door to let him in. “Hey, help yourself to some cookies. I’ve got to call Sam real quick. He should be home soon, if that’s who you’re here for.”

“You wound me!” Brady calls as she makes her way back to the bedroom. “I’m here for you, Jess!”

“Yeah right!” she shouts back, laughing a little as she pulls her cell phone out.

Her thumb hovers over Sam’s number for several long seconds. She doesn’t know why she’s hesitating. They’ve been dating over a year; he wants to _marry_ her, for fuck’s sake. She has just as much of a right to Sam as his brother does.

The phone rings and rings before it goes to voicemail. Jess closes her eyes, trying not to let rejection sting her. When she opens them, Brady’s in the doorway of their bedroom, smiling oddly at her. She frowns a little at him — _what are you doing back here_ — then holds a finger up in a “just one moment” gesture.

“Hey Sam,” she says. “Just calling to make sure you’re on your way back.” Jess pauses, thinks for a second. “I miss you. Okay, well, call me when you get close. Love you, bye.”

Those are the last words Jessica Moore says to Sam Winchester.


End file.
